


The Purifier

by Mez10000



Series: True Names [3]
Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Mentions of Intrusive Thoughts, Spoilers for Main Game, True Names, canon-typical feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 10:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14768261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mez10000/pseuds/Mez10000
Summary: It was reasonably common for seraphs to spend their first hundred years without discovering their true name. It was somewhat rarer to be two hundred years old and still not know their true name. It was downright embarrassing to be three hundred years old and nameless. Lailah was a significant amount older than that - though naturally, she would never divulge exactly how much older - and her own name was still a mystery to her.





	The Purifier

It was reasonably common for seraphs to spend their first hundred years without discovering their true name. It was somewhat rarer to be two hundred years old and still not know their true name. It was downright embarrassing to be three hundred years old and nameless. Lailah was a significant amount older than that - though naturally, she would never divulge exactly how much older - and her own name was still a mystery to her. 

“It’s mortifying, Edna!” Lailah complained. “Michael had to name me himself to form the pact, like a…”

“Like a stray dog? That’s _ruff_.”

“Hey, no taking my puns! It’s very _aruuude_!”

Edna rolled her eyes. “That one was truly terrible, Lailah.”

The two seraphim had been friends for centuries. Lailah often visited the mountain when she found herself at a loose end and Edna - though she would never admit it - appreciated having company once in a while.

“So, spill the beans. What did he call you?”

Gifted names were nowhere near as intimate as true names, though they often held sentimentality that made seraphs reluctant to share them. From the way Lailah muffled the words with her hands, Edna doubted that sentimentality was the reason Lailah did not want to share.

“I didn’t quite catch that…”

“ _Raweb Mioma_ ,” Lailah repeated. “As though I was his mother or something!”

Edna tutted. “Humans really can be so thoughtlessly cruel. To give you such a horrible name as ‘caring’…”

“It just makes me sound so old! What about Lailah the Radiant? Or…”

“Lailah the Over-dramatic?”

Lailah fell silent, absentmindedly folding a square of paper to keep her hands busy. Edna let her keep her silence, waiting patiently while Lailah chased her thoughts into order. When they finally came tumbling out of her mouth, Lailah’s voice was barely louder than a whisper.

“Why couldn’t I have found my true name?”

Edna smiled softly. “You’re just a late bloomer, Lailah. It’ll come to you when you’re ready.”

“What if it doesn’t? What if I’m broken? Whoever heard of a seraph going so long before discovering who they were?”

“My brother was a late bloomer, too,” Edna said. “You’ve still got time before you’re as old as he was.”

“And how would you know that?” Lailah asked, mock indignant. “A lady never divulges her true age!”

“I just know. You’re not an old maid yet.”

Lailah folded a few precise lines into the paper.

“How did you find yours?”

Edna shook her head. “It won’t help you to know. Everyone finds it in their own way, in their own time. You know that.”

Besides, Edna tactfully thought that Lailah would not benefit from hearing how young Edna had been when she had discovered her own name. It would only make her feel worse.

“The only thing you can do is live your life. Try new things. Explore who you are.”

“I thought that’s what I had been doing,” Lailah pouted. “I thought that maybe travelling with a shepherd would help, but…”

Edna scoffed. “You can’t expect a human to happen upon the right experiences for you. They just aren’t around long enough. You need a hobby.”

Lailah finished with the piece of paper she had been working on, which had become an intricate rose over the course of the conversation. She picked up some of the previous attempts from earlier, brandishing a bouquet of paper flowers.

“Don’t you think I already have a _bunch_?”

Edna groaned.

Lailah did follow Edna’s advice, though. She kept wandering for years, meeting local seraphim and trying everything new she came across. She was already a skilled cook, but she added new, complicated pastries to her repertoire after observing unseen in a bakery. She learnt to dance by watching humans during the winter festivals. She read epic prose and romantic poetry. She tried her hand at poetry herself but burnt every trace of her attempts. She sang under cover of moonlight, visited museums filled with human art and fed hungry songbirds outside Ladylake.

Lailah was happy and busy, yet no name came to her.

When the worst happened, she felt it, a powerful tug at the core of her being. It made her dizzy, as though the world itself had tilted, and she scrambled to keep her footing. She gave up, sitting down to get her bearings. It felt like the air was coated in a thick, greasy film, and it was a struggle just to breathe. Lailah did not know what was happening but it felt viscerally wrong. The kind of wrong that perhaps only a shepherd could combat. While there were many shepherds wandering around, Lailah did not know their whereabouts - but she did know Michael’s.

Muttering an apology to herself about dragging her shepherd out of retirement, Lailah pushed herself grimly towards Camlaan.

The air grew heavier and more oppressive with every step. It was sheer force of will that kept Lailah going forward when every instinct screamed to run the opposite way. When she reached the mountains around Camlaan, she could go no further. She could see the still-smouldering wreckage of the town, and the lifeless bodies strewn around. Worse was the acrid malevolence that pooled in the valley; a terrible aching burn in her heart. Even if she had a human vessel, she would not have dared to enter that miasma, but with only having her sword as a vessel she was even more vulnerable to its corruption.

The source of the malevolence appeared to be Maotelus’ shrine, and her heart twisted uncomfortably. Maotelus would not be unaffected - not even he could withstand such a terrible amount of corruption. Lailah now realised the source of her disorientation earlier - Maotelus’ blessing was gone from the land. She had grown so used to its presence that she barely remembered what it felt like before, but now she remembered with sickening clarity.

The malevolence would only build up over time, with no one to purify it. It would sink into animals and plants, gather and multiply in cities, turn seraphim to dragons and humans to monsters. Without Maotelus’ blessing, there could be no purification. Without even Innominat, there was no way at all of disposing of the malevolence. The world could only inevitably become a hellscape of daemons and dragons, eventually wiping out all life.

Lailah shook with the knowledge. She felt so frustratingly helpless. She had wielded Maotelus’ purifying flames before, as his sub-lord. With that pact long broken, she no longer had access to them, but she remembered how it felt. If only she were stronger…

Lailah knew of oaths. They could grant her the power she needed, at a price. Instinctively, she knew the price she would have to pay to gain the power of purification. With absolute certainty, she knew she would pay many worse prices if only to restore some measure of hope to the world.

Lailah would have given her life to bring peace back to Glenwood. She considered her silence about Maotelus to be cheap, albeit fitting. In order to gain Maotelus’ power, she would have to refrain from talking about him. She would never be able to tell anyone what she had suspected had happened here. So much of her life had been spent as a sub-lord under him that even much of her past would be taboo to her. Maotelus’ presence, she realised, had defined so much of her life, and now his disappearance was dictating another great swathe of her life.

But she could purify, all by herself. Almost, anyway. She would need a shepherd, and a mere glance at Camlaan told her Michael was not an option anymore.

Despite the horrors in front of her, Lailah felt a deep calm. This is who she was, who she was always meant to be. _Fethmus Mioma_ , the Purifier. It came to her with sickening clarity, her true name, born out of such a tragedy. She would have happily gone a lifetime not knowing, if only this could have been avoided.

Lailah decided to wait in Ladylake. The town had always been dear to her, and it attracted travellers from all over Glenwood. Surely if a shepherd were to emerge, it would be there.

* * *

 

The world was safe. Sorey was asleep, purifying Maotelus, and despite the odds, everyone had survived.

Lailah turned her gaze towards the mountains that hid Maotelus’ throne from view and sighed. She was happy - she really was - but after the initial relief and loss of that final battle, Lailah had been contemplating her future with more complicated feelings.

“Mopeleo said you were over here,” Edna said, interrupting Lailah’s train of thought. “Guess brooding seraphim can tell where other brooding seraphim are.”

Mikleo was still adjusting to Sorey’s sleep, with about as much grace as anyone could possibly expect. The boys had never spent any real time apart before, so the sudden lack of Sorey in Mikleo’s life kept catching him out at odd moments. Every time everyone thought he had a handle on it, something small would make him reflexively turn to share his thoughts with the Sorey-shaped hole to his right, and then he would spend the next few days alone.

Lailah thought that she had been keeping her own feelings well hidden, but if nothing else, Edna had always been quick to see through facades.

“How is he?” Lailah asked, hoping to divert her attention.

“Crying over some birds for some reason. I left him to it.”

Edna’s words sounded harsh, but Lailah knew she was purposefully giving Mikleo the space to let his feelings out in peace, without having to put on a brave face.

“More importantly, what are you moping about?”

So much for diverting Edna’s attention. Lailah threw herself into a cheery topic with a smile she didn’t truly feel.

“Did you know that butterflies start migrating this time of year? Some travel all the way from Ladylake to Zaphgott Moor!”

“So it’s something to do with Sorey’s naptime buddy,” Edna sighed.

That would make conversation tricky. But Edna was stubborn, and she knew that if she failed to get Lailah to stop brooding, no one else would even notice - much less help.

“Are you worried that something might go wrong?”

“No, Sorey’s safe.”

There was a long silence as Edna contemplated her next question. It made no sense, but she has to know, to discount the possibility.

“Are you worried that things will go _right_?”

“Of course, butterflies have to flap so hard to fly so far and—”

“That’s a yes, then.”

Edna frowned. Something to do with Maotelus and his purification going as expected…it was not a lot to go on, and Edna could not imagine why things going well for them could cause Lailah so much worry. If she could only narrow it down…but Edna did not have the patience for a game of twenty questions.

“Your oath can be a real pain. Are you sure you can’t give me a hint?”

Lailah bit her lip as she thought it through. It took her a long moment, but slowly, carefully, she spoke.

“If it hadn’t been for Sorey, we probably wouldn’t know each other’s true names.”

It was a necessary part of the pact with a shepherd that true names were involved, but the seraphim rarely acknowledged that they knew one another’s names, as a point of politeness. It was an intimate knowledge about one another that they shared. They could never forget it, but they could at least not draw attention to it. Lailah going out of her way to bring up their true names was significant.

“Something to do with your true name and sleeping Sorey’s companion for the next century or so…”

Lailah’s name. _Fethmus Mioma_. Was her worrying something to do with purification? That made little sense. Once Maotelus was awake, there would be more sources of purification than ever before. Unless…

“Are you…afraid that you won’t be needed after Sorey wakes up?”

Lailah steadfastly refused to look at Edna.

“Your true name is the most important thing, the core of who you are…”

Edna snorted. “You think that’s true? All that time before you found your true name, you weren’t important?”

Lailah stayed quiet. Edna came to the swift realisation that perhaps Lailah _had_ thought that. She changed tack quickly.

“Besides, no one can be everywhere at once, not even an Empyrean. You’ll still be busy - humans aren’t going to stop making malevolence anytime soon.”

“I wished Sorey wouldn’t wake up,” Lailah confessed quickly. “Just for a second. I—” Lailah buried her face in her hands. “I’m horrible. How could I—?”

“Did you mean it?”

Lailah wrenched her hands away from her face and threw Edna a horrified look. “Of course not!”

“Then you’re not a horrible person. Everyone has terrible thoughts. I do.”

Lailah frowned. “Surely they aren’t that bad?”

“Sometimes I think about how easy it would be to kill humans. Just one little stomp, a twist of mana, a spike of earth…most humans would never know what hit them. They’d never even suspect a seraph. Just a freak accident. Even if they did somehow know, what could they do? They can’t see me. They can’t harm me.”

Lailah gasped.

“Of course, I wouldn’t. Just because I had a thought doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it, any more than you would act on yours. Your thoughts are not you. Your actions are. Your feelings of guilt - that’s you.”

Lailah slowly nodded, but still turned away.

“Are you still worried you won’t be needed? Look, is a nerd made redundant because there’s a bigger nerd in the world? Because I’ve got bad news for all the students in Ladylake - there’s no bigger nerd than Meebo.”

Lailah gave a watery smile. “At least, not until Sorey gets back.”

Edna quickly turned to hide her amusement behind her umbrella. “True, once prime nerd is done napping, Meebo doesn’t stand a chance.”

Edna heard Lailah’s muffled laughter.

“Thank you, Edna.”

Edna turned back to face Lailah. “Don’t mention it. I mean it, don’t. I don’t want everyone thinking they can come to me with their problems. Anyone else tries, they’re getting a pit of quicksand to add to their trouble.”

Lailah giggled. It was still somewhat forced, but Edna counted it as an improvement, all the same. It would take some time for Lailah to really accept any of this on a deeper level, but Edna would keep reminding her. They had been friends for centuries, after all. Edna could be patient, when she wanted to be.


End file.
